Who said the spending review would be fair? The chancellor.

We heard a lot about fairness in the spending review yesterday. No wonder – the chancellor has an election coming up - and wielding the sword of injustice doesn't win many votes. But conceptions of fairness vary greatly and are never straightforward.

Kindly the chancellor jumped these intractable philosophical hurdles for us by devising his own series of tests. “Fairness,” the chancellor explained in his opening remarks to the Commons, is about making sure “we are all in it together” (insert groan).

He went on to explain that he will achieve a more just settlement by “ensuring that those with the broadest shoulders bear the largest burden.” Secondly he would make sure “the unfairness of the something for nothing culture is changed.”

He then added, “we've always understood that the greatest unfairness was loading debts on to our children that our generation didn't have the courage to tackle ourselves.”

Right from the get go then Osborne set out three conceptions of fairness. The rich should pay the most, entitlements to benefits must be just and there must also be fairness to future generations.

So does the chancellor's 2013 spending review past his own test?

On the first point Osborne was crystal clear: “The Treasury distribution analysis shows that the top fifth of the population lose the most after this spending round.” So a win then?

Just over 2% of that is down to changes in tax credits and benefits. So whilst everyone is worse off (by an average of -2.5%) the poor are only ever so slightly less worse off than the richest fifth.

Overall impact of public service spending, tax, tax credit and benefit changes on households in 2015-16 as a per cent of 2010-11 net income (including households’ benefits in kind from public services). Graph taken from Treasury document Impact on households: distributional analysis to accompany Spending Round 2013 Photograph: HMSO

What about Osborne's second criteria - fairness to benefit entitlements? Most of these rules are subject to very personal conceptions but one of the more noteworthy benefit changes - those to winter fuel payments - throws up all sorts of anomalies.

The Treasury has said that after 2015 the Department of Work and Pensions would introduce a “temperature test” to stop those living in warmer climes from receiving between £100 and £300 a year.

Using the average winter temperature of the UK's warmest region (the south west) they say they will exclude 115,000 pensioners living in Spain, France, and five other EU areas from claiming the WFP because their country's national winter temperature is higher than 5.6C.

It pits the UK's warmest region against the temperatures of entire nations and means that pensioners living in northern France, who have winters as cold as any in the UK won't get fuel payments, whilst those living in Sicily will.

The Treasury's response to this apparent anomaly is that calculating each EU regional temperature would be impractical. But being practical means it isn't fair. There's more. The test only excludes pensioners in EU countries. Good news then for those residing in the Bahamas or India or anywhere in Africa or South America or Australia - under current plans you'll still get your annual payout.

So what about Osborne's third and final intergenerational test? If your stated intent is that you don't want to burden the youngest generation with debts raised by the oldest generation because that would be unfair, then clearly you wouldn't want those same younger people suffering from the effect of the cuts which are being made to pay off said debt. In such a scenario, older people still get let off their responsibility.

In truth the killer sentence - which goes much wider than age alone - is this one: “The groups facing the most significant impacts as a result of decisions taken in the Spending Round are those distinguished by gender, age, race and disability.”

But specifically on age, the seven page document – which does not include all the details needed for official impact assessment document - says that since "older people account for around half of the expenditure on adult social care...they will benefit disproportionately,” to the tune of £2.3 billion in additional NHS funding for health and social care spending. The introduction of a cap on care costs, will also benefit older people.

And then it says, “in order to protect spending in some areas, savings need to be made elsewhere” so, "savings will be made" from various skills and education budgets from which young adults are “over represented amongst the people who benefit”.

There will no doubt be wider effects to the review but these either aren't detailed or - more worryingly given the direction of current trends - are not yet known.

So all in all – it seems that Osborne has failed or just scraped by on the fairness tests he himself has devised. Tell us your thoughts. Do you think Osborne has passed his own fairness tests?